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Studies that have examined organizations' productivity and their leaders have found a rather weak relationship between a leader's personal characteristics and organizational output. Similar empirical studies have also been conducted in relation to universities. These studies have concentrated on university leaders' individual academic performance as a quantifiable individual characteristic. They have yielded rather contradictory results. In this study, I take a theoretical approach to quantify the effects of top leadership on university research performance. I assume that top leaders may influence university research productivity, but this influence should be visible. I theorize two types of university leader: the "strategic manager" who seeks to reallocate resources to make it of use for the whole university and the "politician" who reallocates resources to benefit certain research areas, especially the one they specialize in. It is hypothesized that (1) if a leader is a strategic manager, an increase in overall university research productivity would be observed; and (2) if a leader is a politician, there will be an increase in university performance in the research field in which the leader specializes. Using an extensive sample of Russian universities, it is demonstrated that while there is no observable relationship between overall university research productivity and the university leader's academic excellence, there is a positive influence by university leader's academic productivity on the research performance of his/her specific research field. This study finds evidence that leaders qua "politicians" can have a profound effect on their respective research areas' productivity.

In recent years, university sectors worldwide have undergone intense reforms under the influence of the global ideas of 'new public management' and 'new managerialism'. National policies have widely adopted global scripts with advocacy for strengthening academic leadership as the essential ingredient of successful university transformation. However, how direct is the link between the policy reforms and the changes in the composition of academic leaders? To provide insight into this question, we examined national policy changes in the formal procedure of rector selection from the election to the appointment and the consequences of these changes. We tested the specific hypothesis that the policy reform on the selection procedure has catalysed significant changes in rector leadership towards increasing (1) rector replacement in universities with weak performance, (2) external recruitment, (3) recruitment from the natural and life sciences and diminishing (4) academic credentials. The hypotheses were tested using data on the 136 rector replacements that have occurred in Russian public universities. The data show that, in general, strong support does not emerge from the top-management level to claim that a 'traditional' academic career pathway has been reduced in favour of a new type of leader more suited to strong leadership. We concluded that the national policy tends to adopt those elements of global ideas that provide local benefits. The leadership change not only enables the state to symbolically exhibit proper behaviour but also to strengthen control over public universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies that have examined organizations' productivity and their leaders have found a rather weak relationship between a leader's personal characteristics and organizational output. Similar empirical studies have also been conducted in relation to universities. These studies have concentrated on university leaders' individual academic performance as a quantifiable individual characteristic. They have yielded rather contradictory results. In this study, I take a theoretical approach to quantify the effects of top leadership on university research performance. I assume that top leaders may influence university research productivity, but this influence should be visible. I theorize two types of university leader: the "strategic manager" who seeks to reallocate resources to make it of use for the whole university and the "politician" who reallocates resources to benefit certain research areas, especially the one they specialize in. It is hypothesized that (1) if a leader is a strategic manager, an increase in overall university research productivity would be observed; and (2) if a leader is a politician, there will be an increase in university performance in the research field in which the leader specializes. Using an extensive sample of Russian universities, it is demonstrated that while there is no observable relationship between overall university research productivity and the university leader's academic excellence, there is a positive influence by university leader's academic productivity on the research performance of his/her specific research field. This study finds evidence that leaders qua "politicians" can have a profound effect on their respective research areas' productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]